https://www.phoronix.com/ Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News en-us https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-GFX12.1-RAS-Patch-Series https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-GFX12.1-RAS-Patch-Series AMD has a tendency to send out large feature patch series for their open-source Linux drivers on Friday afternoons/evenings. Today we were greeted by a set of 109 patches working on RAS support for the upcoming AMD GFX12.1 target... Fri, 14 Aug 2026 21:01:22 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/D7VK-2.1 https://www.phoronix.com/news/D7VK-2.1 D7VK as the open-source implementation of the Direct3D 7 / 6 / 5/ 3 APIs atop the Vulkan API for Linux/Wine usage is out with another feature update. D7VK continues to mature quite well for further enhancing these older Direct3D API versions that cover the span prior to DXVK's focus of Direct3D 8 to Direct3D 11 or VKD3D-Proton's Direct3D 12... Fri, 14 Aug 2026 16:26:46 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Lemonade-SDK-11.6 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Lemonade-SDK-11.6 For those dabbling with generative AI on the weekends, the AMD-led Lemonade SDK 11.6 is out today with its newest feature release of this open-source software for running local AI apps with optimized LLMs across CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs... Fri, 14 Aug 2026 16:00:22 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Omarchy-4.0-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/Omarchy-4.0-Released Omarchy as the Arch Linux distribution developed by David Heinemeier Hansson "DHH" / Basecamp is out today with Omarchy 4.0 as the distro's biggest release to date... Fri, 14 Aug 2026 14:10:15 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-xeon-6-linux-72 https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-xeon-6-linux-72 With Linux 7.2 expected for its stable release this weekend, today's testing has some additional testing of the Linux 7.2 Git kernel as well as Linux 7.1 stable compared to Linux 7.0 as used by default on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. Phoronix testing previously conducted of Linux 7.2 have shown benefits for Intel Arc B390 Xe3 in some configurations, faster poll performance on AMD Ryzen Threadripper and other hardware, and some nice I/O performance gains on AMD EPYC Turin. Today's kernel benchmarks are with the Intel Xeon 678X Granite Rapids WS currently in the lab as part of the HP Z4 G6i workstation testing. Fri, 14 Aug 2026 11:18:11 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-Features-Preview https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-Features-Preview With Linux 7.2 expected to see its stable debut Sunday, here is a look at what I have been monitoring as changes expected to be submitted during the Linux 7.3 merge window that will open on Monday... Fri, 14 Aug 2026 07:00:45 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Patches-Fix-DRM-Fair https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Patches-Fix-DRM-Fair Ahead of the Linux 7.2 kernel release expected out on Sunday, the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem was forced to revert their "fair" scheduler policy default new for this kernel. Due to a last minute user-reported regression, FIFO returns as the default DRM scheduler policy for Linux 7.2. But patches are now available for addressing that regression and thus hopefully for Linux 7.3 there will be the fair scheduler becoming the default... Fri, 14 Aug 2026 06:04:16 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/exfatprogs-1.4.3 https://www.phoronix.com/news/exfatprogs-1.4.3 Ahead of the Linux 7.2 kernel release expected on Sunday, a new release of the exFAT file-system user-space programs was released overnight... Fri, 14 Aug 2026 05:44:14 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Zenwalk-BORE-Kernel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Zenwalk-BORE-Kernel It's been a long time since hearing much out of the Zenwalk project, the Linux distribution built off Slackware. It's still around though and with their latest kernel work are hoping for a "true low latency desktop experience" by employing the BORE scheduler... Fri, 14 Aug 2026 05:30:21 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-GAIA-0.23 https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-GAIA-0.23 AMD's GAIA open-source AI software built atop Lemonade for serving as an AI companion for emails, a Bash coding agent, and other AI agent skills is out with a new version today with more features while also improving security and making other improvements... Thu, 13 Aug 2026 20:33:01 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Bullet-Proof-Software https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Bullet-Proof-Software KDE e.V. along with Linux PC vendor Kubuntu Focus and KDE-aligned consulting firm Techpaladin Software have announced a collaboration of the "bullet-proof KDE Software initiative" for providing at least three years of bug fixes and security updates to KDE Plasma 6.6 LTS and related software... Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:08:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.2-Best-Features https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.2-Best-Features With the Linux 7.2 kernel expected to be released on Sunday, 16 August, here is a look at some of the most interesting new features and changes to find with this next kernel version to be used by Ubuntu 26.10 and other upcoming Linux distribution releases... Thu, 13 Aug 2026 15:57:51 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/New-Dasharo-2026-MSI-Intel-Z https://www.phoronix.com/news/New-Dasharo-2026-MSI-Intel-Z In addition to 3mdeb providing their Coreboot-based Dasharo built atop AMD openSIL on a Gigabyte EPYC server motherboard and recently making their first Dasharo release for an AMD Ryzen AM5 platform with the MSI PRO B850-P WIFI, the firmware consulting firm today released updated versions of their MSI PRO Z690-A and MSI PRO Z790-P Dasharo ports to those Intel Core motherboards... Thu, 13 Aug 2026 15:08:39 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/review/framework-13-pro-linux-71-72 https://www.phoronix.com/review/framework-13-pro-linux-71-72 The recently launched Framework Laptop 13 Pro powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" runs well on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and other modern Linux distributions. In the case of Ubuntu 26.04 with Linux 7.0, while everything works, if upgrading to Linux 7.1 or the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel is even better performance. Here are benchmarks of the Framework Laptop 13 Pro with Core Ultra X9 388H across the Linux 7.0, 7.1, and 7.2 kernels. Thu, 13 Aug 2026 10:00:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/GeForce-NOW-Linux-Exits-Beta https://www.phoronix.com/news/GeForce-NOW-Linux-Exits-Beta At the beginning of the year NVIDIA released a native build of GeForce NOW for Linux using Flatpaks. Today their native Linux build has exited beta to reach official production status for this cloud gaming solution from NVIDIA... Thu, 13 Aug 2026 09:21:08 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/MSI-Claw-Gamepad-Linux-7.3 https://www.phoronix.com/news/MSI-Claw-Gamepad-Linux-7.3 The MSI Claw Gamepad driver is set to be merged for the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel for enabling RGB lighting and controller configuration support with the mainline kernel... Thu, 13 Aug 2026 09:11:15 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Apple-M4-NVMe-Patches https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Apple-M4-NVMe-Patches While the Apple M4 SoCs aren't yet supported by the mainline Linux kernel and the Apple M3 series hardware isn't yet ready for end-users, there are some early elements of the Apple M4 support beginning to come together by open-source developers working on the Apple Silicon support. Sent out to the Linux kernel mailing list were patches for enabling NVMe solid state drive support with the M4... Thu, 13 Aug 2026 07:30:36 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Azure-Linux-3.0.20260809 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Azure-Linux-3.0.20260809 While Microsoft continues working on Azure Linux 4.0 as its overhauled Linux distribution built atop Fedora, Azure Linux 3.0 remains the current stable production series. Released overnight was Azure Linux 3.0.20260809 and it comes with more than 233 security patches for recent CVEs in the AI era... Thu, 13 Aug 2026 06:38:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-XPU-Manager-2.1 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-XPU-Manager-2.1 Intel XPU Manager 2.1 is now available as the latest version of this open-source tool for Linux and Windows systems for the monitoring and management of Arc Pro graphics cards. The Intel XPU Manager helps in keeping an eye on device utilization and other metrics via the xpu-smi command and other components... Thu, 13 Aug 2026 06:24:38 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Rsync-3.5 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Rsync-3.5 Rsync as the widely-used, open-source remote sync software for synchronizing files and directories across networks is out today with a very important update... Wed, 12 Aug 2026 21:26:03 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Comma.ai-PCIe-Gen4-USB4-Dock https://www.phoronix.com/news/Comma.ai-PCIe-Gen4-USB4-Dock George Hotz of Comma.ai and Tinygrad today announced the Tiny Chestnut eGPU Dock and the "Chestnut" Dock complete with an AMD Radeon RX 9060 8GB GPU too. Making this Chestnut / Tiny Chestnut Dock interesting is that it runs on open-source firmware... Wed, 12 Aug 2026 20:35:57 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Tenstorrent-Ascalon-XG-GCC https://www.phoronix.com/news/Tenstorrent-Ascalon-XG-GCC While the Tenstorrent Ascalon X is known as their high performance out-of-order RISC-V RVA23 CPU core for extreme performance over the H and S models, a new GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) patch today from Tenstorrent makes known a new Ascalon XG core... Wed, 12 Aug 2026 16:14:37 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/GCC-Git-m128bit-atomic https://www.phoronix.com/news/GCC-Git-m128bit-atomic Merged today to the GNU Compiler Collection Git code is the new -m128bit-atomic option for next year's GCC 17 feature release... Wed, 12 Aug 2026 14:40:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Manjaro-Linux-26.1 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Manjaro-Linux-26.1 Manjaro 26.1 Bian-May is now available as the newest feature release to this desktop Linux distribution built atop an Arch Linux base... Wed, 12 Aug 2026 14:28:03 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-amx-xeon-678x https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-amx-xeon-678x One of the most compelling features for Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids alongside MRDIMMs is Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) for helping accelerate AI workloads and more. AMX is also found with the new Granite Rapids WS processors and in currently having my hands on an Intel Xeon 678X in the HP Z4 G6i workstation, I ran some benchmarks looking at the AMX performance and power impact for this high-end workstation. Wed, 12 Aug 2026 13:07:34 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-2026-Patches-For-2018-MBP https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-2026-Patches-For-2018-MBP Patches posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list provide support for Apple GMUX hybrid graphics support on 2018~2019 Apple MacBook Pros. This allows for better power savings on these nearly decade old MacBook Pro laptops by allowing the discrete GPU to power down and be properly restored as needed... Wed, 12 Aug 2026 10:15:36 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-DG2-Vulkan-Video-AV1 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-DG2-Vulkan-Video-AV1 Hyunjun Ko of Igalia continues working on Vulkan Video support for Intel graphics hardware on Linux with the ANV driver. Merged now for Mesa 26.3-devel is enabling AV1 video encoding via Vulkan Video on DG2/Alchemist hardware... Wed, 12 Aug 2026 09:57:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.2-Reverting-DRM-Fair https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.2-Reverting-DRM-Fair One of the Direct Rendering Manager changes made for Linux 7.2 was switching to "fair" as the DRM scheduler default in place of the existing FIFO policy. The intent was on making the DRM scheduler policy more fair with this being used by AMDGPU and various other DRM kernel graphics drivers. But due to a last minute regression report, the fair policy is being reverted for Linux 7.2... Wed, 12 Aug 2026 06:31:25 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mold-2.42-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mold-2.42-Released It's been quiet since the Mold 2.41 release back in April while today it's now been succeeded by Mold 2.42 for deliver even greater performance out of this high speed linker... Wed, 12 Aug 2026 06:21:09 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-LLM-Scaler-Muse-Glimmer https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-LLM-Scaler-Muse-Glimmer Intel's LLM-Scaler project that was born out of their Project Battlematrix initiative aims to make it easier to run generative AI on Arc (Pro) B-Series graphics cards with the likes of vLLM, ComfyUI, SGLang, and other popular AI software in this Docker-based pre-configured AI stack. This week new LLM-Scaler releases brought same-day support for new models and other enhancements... Wed, 12 Aug 2026 06:12:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/LACT-0.10-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/LACT-0.10-Released LACT is one of the popular third-party Linux GPU configuration and monitoring utilities that works across NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel graphics. This GUI provides GPU overclocking controls plus a wealth of information reporting, which is especially great considering the lack of any official GUI control panel for AMD Radeon and Intel Arc graphics on Linux. With today's LACT 0.10 release, there are yet more features in tow... Wed, 12 Aug 2026 05:52:03 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/QEMU-11.1-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/QEMU-11.1-Released For those using QEMU as part of the open-source virtualization stack, QEMU 11.1 is now available with a number of new feature enhancements and fixes... Tue, 11 Aug 2026 21:42:47 -0400 Michael Larabel